Of Ones and Zeros

Custom Workflows with Collect Data

Posted on 25. Jun, 2008 by bryan.

In the past week I have implemented several custom workflows for a client using SharePoint Designer.  The workflows were pretty simple:  A Forms Services form would be completed, in the form would be a the Manager’s name and e-mail address.  The workflow would use the "Collect Data" action to perform an approval workflow, assigning an item to the manager specified in the form.  Trouble was, the manager would receive the task notification, click the link in the e-mail to edit the task item, and receive an access denied error.

For the purposes of troubleshooting I opened the permissions on the task list as much as possible, granting nt authorityall authenticated users the Full Control permission.  Still the users received "Access denied".  Then, I found the following forum thread:

http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=1838253&SiteID=17

The solution wound up being a combination of two posts, this was by "Vansen":

I opened up the Site using the Sharepoint Designer. Then i right-clicked the workflows folder and chose properties. In the Security Tab i clicked the link "Manage Permissions using the browser". Then a new Browser window opened and i was able to adjust the rights for the Workflow Folder. In my case the rights inheritance was broken. I restored it and it worked.

And this one by "Andre Rentes":

I found a solution but not is the better…

-> Open Sharepoint Designer,

-> right click on Workflow 1 (My workflow)

-> select Publish Selected Files…

-> choose  File System and write a location ( c: ) for example

-> Click OK

 

Combining these two solutions fixed all three of the problematic workflows!  Thanks guys!

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Maintaining Other People’s Code

Posted on 01. Apr, 2008 by bryan.

I have taken over maintenance of other people’s code in the past, and its generally a mixed-bag. Sometimes you inherit a plate of spaghetti, sometimes you luck-out and actually get a well architected and implemented codebase. The real payoff when inheriting maintenance though, is to read the fantastic comments left behind, such as this gem I unearthed today:

// if it's a number we should sort it descending because it is probably a date
// bad? no, this is AWESOME!!!! Regular expressions are for assholes.
int.Parse(f.SubFolders[0].Name);
dv2 = this.GetFolderViewSorted(f, "DESC");

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Logged in as System Account

Posted on 31. Mar, 2008 by bryan.

Had an issue today where a developer was testing a web part that required a user profile, and an exception was being thrown that the user profile did not exist.  We verified in the SSP that the user profile indeed existed, and also used the "stsadm -o sync" command to force a profile synchronization.  However, we discovered that SharePoint was not seeing the actual user name that the user was logged in as, instead SharePoint saw it as "SHAREPOINTSystem".  This led us to the following forum thread:

http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=1195418&SiteID=1

What ended up being the issue is that the developer had configured the SharePoint application pool to run as the same identity that he was logging into SharePoint as.  We changed the configured identity in Central Admin -> Operations -> Service Accounts to use Network Service instead and the issue was resolved.

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Great new Visual Studio color theme

Posted on 28. Mar, 2008 by bryan.

The other day Tomas Restrepo released a new Visual Studio Color Theme called Distant Shores.  It is a low-contrast theme with a dark background, and I must admit I am a BIG FAN!  Have a look at the following screen shot.  BTW – The font I am using is Damien Guard’s Envy CodeR font that Tomas Restrepo recommends in his blog posting.

Give it a shot!  Your eyes will thank you!

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Cannot start service SPAdmin on computer ‘.’

Posted on 25. Mar, 2008 by bryan.

Came in the office today to an issue with a MOSS box that was recently stood up in our lab environment.  The server was configured to do automatic updates, and installed SharePoint updates overnight.  Turns out the upgrade portion of the update failed, and perusing the diagnostic logs revealed the following error:

Cannot start service SPAdmin on computer ‘.’

I came across the following blog posting that ultimately supplied the remedy:

Bill Baer : KB934525 Troubleshooting "Cannot start service SPAdmin on computer ‘.’."

Option #4 took care of things:

• On the machine where psconfig failed to start the SPAdmin service run:

%commonprogramfiles%Microsoft SharedWeb Server Extensions12BINpsconfig -cmd upgrade -inplace b2b -wait -force

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Did I miss a memo? Where is everyone going?

Posted on 13. Mar, 2008 by bryan.

A movement of sorts is afoot in the blogosphere.  Apparently everyone who has a popular blog has seen fit to alter their employment status in the past 6 months:

Joel Oleson:  http://blogs.msdn.com/joelo/archive/2008/03/12/moving-on.aspx

Jeff Atwood: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001074.html

Scott Hanselman: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/BlueBadge.aspx

Craig Shoemaker: http://www.dotnetjunkies.com/WebLog/craigshoemaker/archive/2007/11/14/366194.aspx

Simply an observation.  Bizarre.

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Mounting Virtual PC VHD images on host OS

Posted on 04. Mar, 2008 by bryan.

Found a great new trick today for mounting Virtual PC VHD files as drives within the host operating system.  In the Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 installer is a utility called "VHDMount".  If you install Virtual Server you can elect to only install this utility (if you do a custom install).  This will create a directory "[drive]:Program FilesMicrosoft Virtual ServerVHDMount" within it is a file called VHDMount.exe.  This is a command-line utility that you can use to mount your VHD files.  I regularly use a VHD drive that I share with multiple VPC’s that has common development utilities, and being able to populate that drive without having to boot up one of the VPC’s as a big plus.

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Internet Explorer (IE) crashing accessing SharePoint lists

Posted on 04. Mar, 2008 by admin.

If you have clients with a mix of Office 2003 and Office 2007 components (for instance Word 2003, Excel 2003, but SharePoint Designer 2007), they may experience intermittent Internet Explorer crashes.  The following hotfix from Microsoft corrects this issue:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/938888

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Import Spreadsheet – “Cannot connect to the server at this time.”

Posted on 04. Mar, 2008 by admin.

Ran into an issue today with trying to import an Excel 2003 spreadsheet into a SharePoint list.  SharePoint would load Excel, then you select the cells in Excel that you want to import, you click Import and Excel responds with "Cannot connect to the server at this time."  After a long while searching for a solution, I came across the following link:

WSS FAQ – I cannot import from Excel 2003 to WSS. What’s…

Basically the solution was 2 workarounds:

a.) Import the spreadsheet into a root site, then create a list template and use that to create the list within a subsite.

or

b.) Use Excel’s List Publishing feature to publish directly to the subsite.

I tested both options and they each worked equally well, I ultimately went with option B as it seemed a cleaner solution.

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A.D.D. Be Gone!

Posted on 14. Jan, 2008 by bryan.

Working with SharePoint, particularly within VPN environments, can be a focus-challenging task. Write new master page, compile new web part, wait for SharePoint to recompile (okay, more specifically ASP.NET), lose focus, fire up FireFox, browse net for 15 minutes, forget what you were working on, remember, and continue work. Now I am a BIG fan of multi-monitor setups, I feel it generally improves productivity. However, when I find myself staring at IE while waiting on SharePoint, I will often glance at my other monitor and see all those pretty desktop icons, or a tempting FireFox browser session, and I’ll fill time while waiting on SharePoint.

The thought occurred to me earlier this week — what if I could black out the rest of my screen and see ONLY the window that am currently working on? Sure, in full-screen scenarios that may be simple, but when you regularly work within VPC’s and have a multi-monitor setup with different screen resolutions, the solution is not as simple. So I did a google search for this very creation and alas, I am not alone! Over at www.lifehack.org I was able to find a fantastic utility application to achieve exactly what I want, and it is called Dropcloth written by Adam Pash.

Once you launch Dropcloth it will take up residence in your systray. The “Settings” menu provides the ability to change the screen overlay, whether Dropcloth appears in the taskbar, whether Dropcloth should keep the active application above the Dropcloth, the transparency level of the overlay, and a hotkey.

When you want to stay focused on a given task and see only that window, simply press the hotkey combination, in my case Ctrl-Shift-C. The rest of your screen will black out (or whatever color you have chosen). In order to remove the dropcloth you can press the hotkey combination again and your screen will be restored.

As an added bonus, this utility is great for taking screenshots. In that instance it may be best to set the background color to #ffffff (white).

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